SVN Checkout Error: Malformed Network Data; Using TortoiseSVN or SVN CLI

I recently upgraded the Project Management Software, which happened to be Redmine, for a company and after the upgrade I received some complaints regarding SVN not functioning properly. I initially thought there is no way that the upgrade caused an issue with SVN since SVN and Redmine are completely separate however you can browse the SVN repositories from within Redmine. Below I describe the error in more detail including an image of the error from TortoiseSVN, what I did to resolve the issue, and another possible resolution if your issue is different than the one mentioned in this article.

SVN Checkout Error: Malformed Network Data

Resolve SVN Malformed Network Data Error After Redmine Upgrade:

As you can see above the error is fairly generic and doesn’t provide any specific details to assist with troubleshooting. In fact you really only know that there is an error. After a minimal amount of troubleshooting I was able to quickly track down the issue. As I mentioned previously I had upgraded Redmine within the past 24 hours and while Redmine and SVN are separate I realized that I had put the SVN repositories within the Redmine project directory. During the Redmine upgrade process I moved the old Redmine project directory to create a new one for the upgraded Redmine software and in the process I moved the SVN repos directory. So to resolve the SVN malformed network data error in this case I simply moved the SVN repositories back to their original location within the Redmine project directory. Without even having to restart SVN on the server I was able to successfully sync to the various repositories on the server.

Another Possible SVN Malformed Data Error Resolution:

Before I even started troubleshooting the error above I looked into what the “Malformed Network Data” error could mean and found that many other people run into the same issue. It appears that in many scenarios that simply restarting SVN as shown below will resolve the issue.

Restart SVN Via Xinetd On CentOS Linux Server:

[root@dev ~]# /etc/init.d/xinetd restart
Stopping xinetd: [ OK ]
Starting xinetd: [ OK ]

If your issue isn’t as easy as moving the SVN repos directory back to the proper location or something similar than I would suggest first trying to restart the SVN process which could vary depending on how SVN is configured on your server. In the above example SVN is configured in xinetd and can be restarted on CentOS Linux using the xinetd init.d script.